Shadrach in the Furnace

1.

It is nine minutes before sunrise in the great city of Ulan Bator, capital of the reconstituted world. For some time now Dr. Shadrach Mordecai has lain awake, restless and tense in his hammock, staring somberly at aglowing green circlet in the wall that is the shining face of his data screen. Red letters on the screen announce the new day:

As usual, Dr. Mordecai has been unable to get more than a few hours of sleep. Insomnia has plagued him all year; his wakefulness must be some kind of message from his cerebral cortex, but so far he has been unable to decipher it. Today, at least, he has some excuse for awakening early, because great challenges and tensions lie ahead. Dr. Mordecai is personal physician to Genghis II Mao IV Khan, Prince of Princes and Chairman of Chairmen — which is to say, ruler of the earth — and on this day the aged Genghis Mao is due to undergo a liver transplant, his third in seven years. The world leader sleeps less than twenty meters away, in a suite adjoining Mordecai’s. Dictator and doctor occupy residential chambers on the seventy-fifth floor of the Grand Tower of the Khan, a superb onyx-walled needle of a building that rises breathtakingly from the dusty brown Mongolian tableland. Just now Genghis Mao sleeps soundly, eyes unmoving beneath the thick lids, spine enviably relaxed, respiration slow and even, pulse steady, hormone levels rising normally. Mordecai knows all this because he carries, surgically inlaid in the flesh of his arms, thighs, and buttocks, several dozen minute perceptor nodes that constantly provide him with telemetered information on the stale of Genghis Mao’s vital signs. It took Mordecai a year of full-time training to learn to read the input, the tiny twitches and tremors and flickers and itches that are the analogue-coded equivalents of the Chairman’s major bodily processes, but by this time it is second nature for him to perceive and comprehend the data. A tickle here means digestive distress, a throb there means urinary sluggishness, a pricking elsewhere tells of saline imbalance. For Shadrach Mordecai it is something like living in two bodies at once, but he has grown accustomed to it. And so the Chairman’s precious life is safeguarded by his vigilant physician. Genghis Mao is officially said to be eighty-seven years old and may be even older, though his body, a patchwork of artificial and transplanted organs, is as strong and responsive as that of a man of fifty. It is the Chairman’s wish to postpone death until his work on earth is complete — which is to say, never to die.

How sweetly he rests now! Mordecai runs automatically through the readings again and again: respiratory, digestive, endocrine, circulatory, all the autonomic systems going beautifully. The Chairman, dreamless (the motionless eyes), lying as customary on his left side (faint aortal pressure), emitting gentle hhnnorrking snores (reverberations in the rib cage), obviously feels no apprehension about the coming surgery. Mordecai envies him his calmness. Of course, organ transplants are an old story to Genghis Mao.

At the precise moment of dawn the doctor leaves his hammock, stretches, walks naked across his bedchamber’s cool stone floor to the balcony, and steps outside. The air, suffused now with early blue to the east, is clear, crisp, cold, with a sharp wind blowing across the plains, a strong southerly breeze racing through Mongolia from the Great Wall toward Lake Baikal. It ruffles the black flags of Genghis Mao in Sukhe Baior Square, the capital’s grand plaza, and stirs the boughs of the pink-blossomed tamarisks. Shadrach Mordecai inhales deeply and studies the remote horizon, as if looking for meaningful smoke signals out of China. No signals come; only the little throbs and tingles of the implant disks, caroling the song of Genghis Mao’s irrepressible good health.

All is quiet below. The whole city sleeps, save for those who must be awake to work; Mongols are not given to insomnia. Mordecai is; but then, Mordecai isn’t a Mongol. He is a black man, dark with an African darkness, though he is no African either; slender, long-limbed, tall — some two hundred centimeters in height — with dense woolly hair, large wide-set eyes, full lips, a broad though high-bridged nose. In this land of sturdy golden-skinned folk with sharp noses and glossy straight hair. Dr. Mordecai is a conspicuous figure, more conspicuous, perhaps, than he would like to be.

He squats, straightens, squats, straightens, jackknifing his arms out and in, out and in. He starts every morning with a calisthenic routine on the balcony, naked in the chilly air: he is thirty-six years old, and even though his post in the government gives him guaranteed access to the Roncevic Antidote, even though he is thus spared the fear of organ-rot that obsesses most of the world’s two billion inhabitants, thirty-six is nevertheless an age when one must begin conscientiously to take measures to protect the body against the normal unravelings time brings. Metis sana in corpore sano; yes, keep on bending and twisting, Shadrach; make the juices flow; let the old yin balance the yang. He is in perfect health, and his bodily organs are the ones that were in him when he popped from the womb one frosty day in 1976. Up, down, up, down, unsparing of self. Sometimes it seems odd to him that his vigorous, violent morning exercises never awaken Genghis Mao, but of course the flow of telemetered data runs only in one direction, and as Mordecai puts himself through his fierce balcony workout, the Chairman snores placidly on, unaware.

Eventually, panting, perspiring, shivering lightly, feeling alive and open and receptive, hardly worrying at all about the coming surgical ordeal, Mordecai decides he has had enough of a workout. He washes, dresses, punches for his customary light breakfast, and sets about his morning routine of duties.

So, then, the doctor confronts Interface Three, through which he daily enters the residential suite of his master the Khan. It is a ponderous diamond-shaped doorway, two and a half meters high. From its silken-smooth bronze surface jut a dozen and a half warty cylindrical snouts, three to nine centimeters high. Some of them are scanners and sensors, some are audio conduits, some are weapons of ineluctable lethality; and Shadrach Mordecai has no idea which is which. Most likely, what serves as a scanner today may well be a laser cannon tomorrow; with such random shifts of function does Genghis Mao contrive to confuse the faceless assassins he so vividly dreads.

“Shadrach Mordecai to serve the Khan,” Mordecai says in a clear firm voice into what he hopes is today’s audio pickup.

Interface Three, now emitting a gentle hum, subjects Mordecai’s announcement to voiceprint analysis. At the same time, Mordecai’s body is being checked for thermal output, mass, postural stress, olfactory texture, and much more. If any datum should fall beyond the established Mordecai-norm, he could find himself immobilized by loops of suddenly spurting webfoam while the guards are summoned to investigate; resistance at that point might lead to his immediate destruction. Five of these interfaces protect the five entrances to Chairman Genghis Mao’s chambers, and they are the wiliest doors ever devised. Daedalus himself could not have forged more clever barriers to guard King Minos.

In a microsecond Mordecai is recognized to be himself, rather than some cunning lifelike simulacrum on a king-slaying errand. With a smooth hiss of perfectly machined joints and a gentle nimble of flawless bearings the interface’s outer slab glides open. This admits the doctor to a stone-walled inner holding chamber hardly larger than himself. No welcome vestibule for claustrophobes, this. Here he must halt another microsecond while the entire surveillance is repeated, and only after he passes this second muster is he allowed to enter the imperial residence proper.

“Redundancy,” Chairman Genghis Mao has declared, “is our main avenue of survival.” Mordecai agrees. The intricate business of crossing these interfaces is a trifle to him, part of the normal order of the universe, no more bothersome than the need to turn a key in a lock. The room just on the far side of Interface Three is a cavernous sphere known as Surveillance Vector One. It is, in a literal sense, Genghis Mao’s window on the world. Here a dazzling array of screens, each five square meters in area, rises in overwhelming tiers from floor to ceiling, offering a constantly shifting panorama of televised images relayed from thousands of spy-eyes everywhere on the planet. No great public building is without its secret eyes; scanners look down on all major streets; a corps of government engineers is constantly employed in shifting the cameras from place to place and in installing new ones in previously unspied-upon places. Nor are all the eyes in fixed positions. So many spy-satellites streak through the nearer reaches of space that if their orbits were turned to silk they would swathe the earth in a dense cocoon. At the center of Surveillance Vector One is a grand control panel by means of which the Khan, sitting for hours at a time in an elegant thronelike seat, is able to control the flow of data from all these eyes, calling in signals with quick flutters of his fingertips so that he may look at will into the doings of Tokyo and Bangkok, New York and Moscow, Buenos Aires and Cairo. So sharp is the resolution of the Khan’s myriad lenses that they can show Genghis Mao the color of a man’s eyes at a distance of five kilometers.

When the Chairman is not making use of Surveillance Vector One, the hundreds of screens continue to function without interruption as the master mechanism sucks in data randomly from the innumerable pickup points. Images come and go, sometimes flitting across a screen in a second or two, sometimes lingering to provide consecutive sequences many minutes in length. Shadrach Mordecai, since he must pass through this room every morning on his way to his master, has formed the habit of pausing for a few minutes to watch the gaudy, dizzying stream of pictures. Privately he refers to this daily interlude as “Checking the Trauma Ward,” the Trauma Ward being Mordecai’s secret name for the world in general, that great vale of sorrow and bodily corruption.

He stands in mid-room now, observing the world’s griefs.

The flow is jerkier than usual today; whatever giant computer operates this system is in a twitchy mood, it seems, its commands moving restlessly from eye to eye, and pictures wink on and off in a frenzied way. Still, there are isolated flashes of clarity. A limping woebegone dog moves slowly down a dirt-choked street. A big-eyed, big-bellied Negroid child stands naked in a dust-swept ravine, gnawing her thumb and crying. A sag-shouldered old woman, carrying carefully wrapped bundles through the cobbled plaza of some mellow European city, gasps and clutches at her chest, letting her packages tumble as she falls. A parched Oriental-faced man with wispy white beard and tiny green skullcap emerges from a shop, coughs, and spits blood. A crowd — Mexicans? Japanese? — gathers around two boys dueling with carving knives; their arms and chests are bright with red cuts. Three children huddle on the roof of a torn-away house rushing swiftly downstream on the white-flecked gray breast of a flooding river. A hawk-faced beggar stretches forth an accusing clawlike hand. A young dark-haired woman kneels at a curb, bowed double in pain, head touching the pavement, while two small boys look on. A speeding automobile veers crazily from a highway and vanishes in a bushy gulley. Surveillance Vector One is like some vast tapestry of hundreds of compartments, each with a story to tell, a fragmentary story, tantalizing, defying comprehension. Out there in the world, out in the great big wide Trauma Ward that is the world, the two billion subjects of Genghis II Mao IV Khan are dying hour by hour, despite the best efforts of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee. Nothing new about that — everyone who has ever lived has died hour by hour all through his life — but the modes of death are different in these years following the Virus War; death seems ever so much more immediate when so many people are so conspicuously rotting within all at once; and the general decay out there is that much more poignant because there are these innumerable eyes to see it in its totality. The scanners of the Khan capture everything, making no comment, offering no judgment, merely filling these walls with a staggering, baffling portrait of the revised postwar early-twenty-first-century version of the human condition.

The room is a touchstone of character, drawing revealing responses from every viewer. To Mordecai the whirling stream of scenes is fascinating and repelling, a crazy mosaic of decomposition and defeat, courage and endurance; he loves and pities the sufferers who flash so quickly across the screens, and if he could he would embrace them all — lift that old woman to her feet, put coins in the beggar’s gnarled hand, stroke that child’s distended belly. But Mordecai is, by inclination and profession, a healer. To others the brutal theater that is Surveillance Vector One serves only as a reminder of their own good fortune: how wise of them it was to attain high governmental rank and steady supplies of the Roncevic Antidote, to enjoy the favor of Chairman Genghis Mao and live free of pain and hunger and organ-rot, insulated from the nightmare of real life! To others the screens are unbearable, arousing not a sense of smug superiority but rather a feeling of intolerable guilt that they should be here, safe, while they are out there. And to others the screens are merely boring: they show dramas without plot, transactions without discernible purpose, tragedies without moral significance, mere stray snatches of life’s scratchy fabric. What Genghis Mao’s own reactions to Surveillance Vector One may be is impossible to determine, for the Khan is, in this as in so many other things, wholly inscrutable as he manipulates the controls. But he does spend hours in there. Somehow the room feeds him. Shadrach Mordecai takes his time this morning, giving the huge room five minutes, eight, ten. Genghis Mao still sleeps, after all. The implanted monitors tell Mordecai that. In this world no one escapes surveillance; while the many eyes of Genghis Mao scan the globe, the slumbering Khan is himself scanned by his physician. Mordecai, standing quite motionless beside the Chairman’s upholstered throne, receives a flood of data within and without, Genghis Mao’s metabolic output twanging and tweaking the doctor’s implants, the flowing shimmer of the screens assailing his eyes. He starts to leave, but just then a screen high up and to his left shows him a glimpse of what is certainly Philadelphia, unmistakably Philadelphia, and he halts, riveted. His native city: he was a Bicentennial baby, entering the world in Ben Franklin’s own town, coming forth high up in Hahnemann Hospital when the United States of America was four months short of its two hundredth birthday. And there is Philadelphia now, turning in the gyre of some ineffably keen satellite-mounted eye; the familiar childhood totems, City Hall, Independence Hall, Penn Center, Christ Church. It is years since he last was there. For a decade now, Shadrach Mordecai has lived in Mongolia. Once it was hard for him to believe that there really was such a place as Mongolia, fabled land of Prester John and Genghis Khan, but by this time it is Philadelphia that has started to seem a place of fable to him. And the United States of America? Do those syllables still have meaning? Who could imagine that the Constitution of Jefferson and Madison would be forgotten, and America pledge allegiance to a Mongol overlord? But that overstates the case: America, Mordecai knows, is governed like all other nations by a local wing of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, that alliance of radical and reactionary groups functioning through a series of vestigial quasi-democratic institutions; and the aged recluse Genghis Mao is merely the Chairman of the Committee, a remote and semimythical figure who governs indirectly and has no immediate consequence in the daily lives of Dr. Mordecai’s former countrymen. Probably no one in America pauses to consider Genghis Mao the embodiment of the authority of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, and thus the true master of the body politic, any more than one considers the chairman of the board of the local electric company to be the source and controller of the power that flows when the switch is thrown. But he is. Not that many Americans would be disturbed to learn that they owed fealty to a Mongol. The whole world has abdicated; the game of politics is ended; Genghis Mao rules by default, rules because no one cares, because in an exhausted, shattered world dying of organ-rot, there is general relief that someone, anyone, is willing to play the role of global dictator.

Philadelphia vanishes from the screen and is replaced by an idyllic tropical scene, pink-white half-moon beach, feathery palm fronds, flowering hibiscus in scarlet and yellow, no people in view. Mordecai shrugs and moves on.

The imperial chambers are circular in layout, occupying the entire top story of the Grand Tower of the Khan except for the five wedge-shaped apartments, such as the one where Mordecai lives, that notch into the suite equidistantly around its rim. As the doctor crosses Surveillance Vector One he comes to three massive doorways, spaced some eight meters apart along the side of the room farthest from the interface through which he entered. The left-hand doorway leads to the bedroom of Genghis Mao, but Mordecai does not take it — best to let the Chairman have all the sleep he needs, today — nor does he choose the central doorway, which goes to the Chairman’s private office. Instead he approaches the right-hand doorway, the one that opens into the room known as Committee Vector One, through which he must pass to reach his own office.

He waits briefly while the door scans and approves him. All the inner rooms of the imperial suite are divided one from another by such impermeable barriers, smaller in scope than the main doors at the five interfaces but similarly suspicious: no one is allowed to range freely here from room to room. After a moment the door grants him entry to Committee Vector One. This is a large, brightly lit room, spherical like all the major rooms of Genghis Mao’s suite. It occupies the physical center of the apartment, the locus around which all else turns, and in a less literal sense it is the nerve center of the planetary governing structure, the Permanent Revolutionary Committee. Here, day and night, arrive urgent communiques from Committee cadres in every city; and here, day and night. Committee potentates sit in front of intricate switchboards glistening with terminals, making policy and communicating it to the lesser satraps in the outer provinces. All applications for Roncevic Antidote treatments are routed through this room; all requests for organ transplants, regeneration therapy, and other vital medical services are considered in Committee Vector One; all jurisdictional disputes within the regional Committee leadership are settled here according to the principles of centripetal depolarization, Genghis Mao’s chief philosophical gift to humanity. Shadrach Mordecai is not a political man and he has little concern with the events that take place in Committee Vector One, but since the floor plan of the building requires him to cross the room many times a day, he does occasionally pause to observe the bureaucrats at their labors, the way he might stop to examine the behavior of bizarre insects in a crumbling log.

Not much seems to be going on here now. At times of high crisis all twelve of the switchboard seats are occupied, and Genghis Mao himself, seated at his own elaborate desk at the very center of everything, fiercely manipulating his formidable battery of sophisticated communications devices, directs the course of strategy. But these are quiet days. The only conspicuous crisis in the world is the one in the Chairman’s liver, and that will soon be remedied. For weeks now Genghis Mao has not bothered to take up his post in Committee Vector One, preferring to discharge his sovereign responsibilities from his smaller private office adjoining his bedroom. And only three of the switch-boards are in use this morning, operated by weary-looking vice-chairmen, one male and two female, who yawn and slouch as they take incoming messages and formulate appropriate replies.

Mordecai is halfway across the room and walking briskly when someone calls his name. He turns and sees Mangu, the heir-apparent to Genghis Mao, heading toward him from the direction of the Chairman’s private office.

“Do they operate on the Khan today?” Mangu asks worriedly. Mordecai says, nodding, “In about three hours.”

Mangu frowns. He is a sleek, handsome young Mongol, unusually tall for his kind, nearly as tall as Mordecai himself.

His face is round; his features are symmetrical and pleasing; his eyes are bright and alert. At the moment he seems tense, jangled,

“Will it go well, Shadrach? Are there any risks?”

“Don’t worry. You won’t become Khan today. It’s only a liver transplant, after all.”

“Only!”

“Genghis Mao’s had plenty of those.”

“But how much more surgery can he stand? Genghis Mao is an old man.”

“Better not let him hear you say that!”

“He’s probably listening right this minute,” says Mangu casually. Some of the tension goes from him. He grins. “The Khan never takes what I say seriously, anyway. I believe he sometimes thinks I’m a bit of a fool.”

Mordecai smiles guardedly. He also sometimes thinks Mangu is a bit of a fool, and perhaps more than a bit. He remembers Dr. Crowfoot of Project Avatar, Nikki Crowfoot, his Nikki with whom he would have spent this past night but for Genghis Mao’s operation, telling him months ago of the dismal fate reserved for Mangu. Mordecai knows, as Mangu almost certainly does not, that Genghis Mao plans to be his own successor, through the vehicle of Mangu’s strong, healthy young body. If Project Avatar is carried to a successful conclusion, and the auguries are favorable for it, the fine sturdy figure of Mangu will indeed someday sit upon the throne of Genghis Mao, but Mangu himself won’t be there to enjoy the occasion. To Mordecai, anyone who marches as blithely toward his own destruction as Mangu is doing, perceiving nothing, suspecting nothing, fearing nothing, is a fool and worse than a fool.

“Where will you be during the operation?” Mordecai asks.

Mangu gestures broadly toward the main command desk of Committee Vector One. “Over there, pretending to run the show.”

“Pretending?”

“You know there are many things I still have to learn, Shadrach. I’m not going to be ready to take over for years. That’s why I wish he wouldn’t undergo all these transplants.”

“He doesn’t do it for the exercise,” Mordecai says. “The present liver’s been failing for weeks. It’s got to come out. But I tell you: don’t worry.”

Mangu smiles and grips Mordecai’s forearm for a brief, affectionate, surprisingly painful squeeze. “I won’t. I have faith in you, Shadrach. In the whole medical team that keeps the Khan alive. Let me know the moment it’s over, will you?”

He strides away, toward the main command post, to play at being monarch of the world.

Mordecai shakes his head. Mangu is an attractive figure, genial and charming and even charismatic. In a dark time lit only by ghastly jagged flashes of nightmare-light, Mangu is something of a popular hero. In the past ten months or so he has become the Chairman’s public surrogate, appearing in Genghis Mao’s place at formal functions, dam dedications, Committee congresses and the like, and the dashing, gallant prince-in-waiting, so disarming, so unpretentious, so accessible to the populace, is beloved in a way that Genghis Mao never has been, never for an instant. Those who have observed Mangu at close range are aware that he is essentially a hollow man, all image and no substance, shallow and plump-souled, an amiable athlete living an implausible charade; but though Mangu is trivial, he is far from contemptible, and Mordecai feels genuine compassion for him. Poor Mangu, fretting over the possibility that he might succeed the Khan this day, with his apprenticeship not yet finished! Does it ever occur to Mangu that he will never — not in a year, not in ten years, not in a thousands — be a fit successor to Genghis Mao, that he is fundamentally incapable of wielding the terrible power which he is ostensibly being groomed to inherit? Apparently not. Or else Mangu, knowing his own limits, would gave begun to wonder what plan Genghis Mao really had for him, why the Chairman had picked as his successor a mere handsome boy, his own opposite in all important respects. To train him to be supreme sovereign? No. No. To be a puppet, merely; to dance before the people and win their love. And then, one day, to have his identity scooped out and thrown away, so that his body might become a dwelling for the wily mind and dark soul of Genghis Mao, when the Chairman’s own ancient patched hull can no longer be repaired. Poor Mangu. Mordecai shivers. He hurries on into his own office, closes the door, seals it.

There is a sudden sharp twanging in his left thigh, close to the hip, the place where he receives Genghis Mao’s cerebral output. Four rooms away, the Khan is awakening.